The Zambian government’s recent last-minute decision to call off RightsCon, an annual technology and human rights conference that was to host 2,600 delegates in person with another 1,100 online from across the globe, was a shocking development. It would have marked the first time in the history of the conference that it was hosted in sub-Saharan Africa and its first return to the continent since 2019 in Tunisia.
We were both set to attend, with rapidly approaching flights, when the decision came just eight days before the planned start. Many others had already traveled to Zambia, meeting with partners and laying the groundwork for what promised to be an important exchange of ideas on how to advance human rights in a world where so much of life exists in the digital sphere.
In reality, however, perhaps human rights and pro-democracy supporters shouldn’t have been surprised. Although the Zambian government cited non-specific administrative and security clearances and “key thematic” concerns, the host organization, Access Now, released a statement on May 1, saying its leaders “believe foreign interference is the reason RightsCon 2026 won’t proceed in Zambia or online.“ The statement said they were told informally that, in order for the conference to proceed, they “would have to moderate specific topics and exclude communities at risk, including our Taiwanese participants, from in-person and online participation.”
Clearly Chinese pressure had come to bear, given Zambia’s deep dependence on trade with China and on its economic investments. But the cancellation of a human rights conference for the audacity of having human rights themes is part of a broader backwards slide towards authoritarianism by the government in Lusaka. The United States under the Biden administration had hailed Zambia as a democratic darling and showered its government and economy with significant support. This belief was embodied within the country’s charismatic new president, Hakainde Hichilema, who had been a political prisoner under the previous regime and pledged to focus on education and expand decentralization to improve development outcomes. He had even taken some steps in that direction.
But the intense personalization of diplomacy and aid relations with countries in transition has long caught donor countries unaware when their partners prove fallible. The history of such dynamics holds an important lesson: that democratic reform is uneven and can often resemble the adage of “two steps forward and one step back.” Highlighting only the positive while ignoring the negative makes it all the easier for the detrimental behavior to continue and expand. Countries and individuals involved in democracy promotion need to take to heart the dangers of lionizing individual leaders without a backup plan should relations sour.
Hichilema’s Promising Emergence
Hichilema’s August 2021 election victory was his sixth attempt at the presidency. Born in a rural southern town and raised herding cattle, he had built a career as a private investor before entering politics in 2006 as leader of the United Party for National Development (UPND). Repeatedly detained by police on dubious grounds and arrested in 2017 on treason charges, Hichilema was released only after the Commonwealth — the voluntary association of 56 mostly former British colonies — pressed the government of then-President Edgar Lungu for his release. By 2021, he had become the most consequential opposition figure in Zambia’s post-independence history.
The 2021 election campaign unfolded against serious institutional manipulation by Lungu, including a recompiled voter register that critics saw as gerrymandered, a failed push for constitutional amendments that would have expanded executive power, and social media restrictions on polling day. Given Hichilema’s significant margin of victory — 59 percent — and reported diplomatic pressure from the United States and others behind the scenes, Lungu ultimately conceded. Voter turnout that August had reached a 16-year high and opposition activists across the continent hailed the outcome as proof that sustained democratic opposition can dislodge even deeply entrenched incumbents.
Hichilema entered office days later, inheriting an economy that had contracted 3.1 percent in 2020, with a total national debt of nearly $27 billion, and the ignominy of being the first African country to default on its external debt during the COVID-19 pandemic. In his inauguration speech, he declared a “New Dawn,” a phrase deliberately chosen to signal a clean break from what he characterized as the brutality and democratic decay of the Lungu years. It was a slogan his government would continue to apply to itself in official communications for years afterward.
A Warm Embrace from the United States
Few bilateral relationships under the Biden administration were cultivated with as much enthusiasm as the one with Hichilema’s Zambia. Washington saw in the “New Dawn” exactly the kind of democratic renewal it wanted to hold up as a model for Africa, especially against the backdrop of one of the Biden administration’s priority themes – strengthening democracy, including via its Summit for Democracy gatherings. Samantha Power, President Joe Biden’s administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development, spoke with Hichilema days after the Zambia vote, pledging partnership. The following month, Hichilema met then-Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House. The next month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Zambia’s commitment to democratic ideals “an inspiration to all seeking freedom, prosperity, and justice.” The Biden administration soon pledged $23 million in new aid to strengthen civil liberties, governance, and economic growth.
The strategic architecture of the U.S. relationship with Zambia rapidly grew more elaborate. The State Department’s Integrated Country Strategy, approved in April 2022, characterized the moment as the best opening in a generation to partner with a Zambian leader aligned on shared democratic principles. The strategy set an explicit ambition of ensuring that the United States would be Zambia’s preferred partner country, with the implicit claim that the main competitor was China. When USAID launched its Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal in September 2022, Zambia was one of eight designated focus countries, making it eligible under two programs, the Partnerships for Democratic Development and Democracy Delivers, and layering substantial new governance and civil society funding on top of an already large bilateral portfolio.
The Biden administration then heavily supported Zambia to serve as a co-host of the second Summit for Democracy in March 2023, casting Hichilema on the world stage as a peer democratic leader and regional model. Total U.S. government support reached an estimated $600 million annually, even as the Zambian government’s failure to curb theft of medicines and medical supplies prompted a cut of $50 million in 2025. The overall funding was anchored by a commitment from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), begun under President George W. Bush, which had exceeded $5.85 billion for Zambia since 2004 and was on track to achieve control of the country’s HIV epidemic by 2023. When a severe drought struck in 2024, USAID provided an additional $66.8 million in humanitarian and food security assistance.
The Reform Narrative Frays
But as the medicine theft case illustrated, the U.S. enthusiasm ran well ahead of the evidence of reform that Hichilema had promised, and the volume of assistance outpaced the capacity to use it well. As an Africa specialist at USAID for 15 years, it could be painful to see the accumulation of presidential initiatives in one country create as many headaches as opportunities: rationalizing competing priorities, moving money from Washington to the field, structuring agreements with partners, and capturing meaningful results were persistent challenges wherever multiple funding streams converged. Zambia was not unique in this regard, but the volume and pace of funding that flowed its way made it an acute case.
Meanwhile the hoped-for democratic transformation in Zambia justifying the U.S. investment was failing to materialize. Although Hichilema in December 2022 repealed the colonial-era defamation law that had penalized criticism of the president and approved the Access to Information Act in January 2024, aimed at transparency, his government actually grew increasingly intolerant of dissent. In April 2025, Parliament enacted the Cyber Security Act and Cyber Crimes Act, which civil society organizations argued posed sweeping threats to privacy and freedom of expression. Senior opposition leaders were charged with espionage for criticizing Hichilema in a foreign documentary, dozens of legislators were suspended for procedural protests, and anti-corruption prosecutions fell predominantly on opposition-aligned figures. Press freedom surveys found a substantial majority of Zambian journalists reporting deteriorating conditions. The U.S. Embassy in Zambia itself issued an advisory warning U.S. citizens that they could be subject to surveillance under the new cyber laws, an awkward posture for Washington given it had so publicly championed the country’s democratic emergence.
Whether any of this would have prompted a serious reckoning from Washington ahead of Hichilema’s bid for a third term this August is a question the Trump administration’s dismantling of the assistance relationship has made unanswerable. The Biden administration’s democracy agenda was built on bets on charismatic leaders at moments of genuine democratic opening that did not always account for how quickly reformist momentum can stall, how limited U.S. leverage becomes once overtures turn into a full embrace, and how hard it is to help partner countries build durable institutions with U.S. budget and programming cycles measured in fiscal years. Those shortcomings are worth remembering, because the next democratic opening will come, and the question of how to support it without overselling it will matter just as much.
Picking Winners and the Nature of Democratization
The pattern of picking winners predates the Biden administration. When Ethiopia’s Hailemariam Desalegn resigned in February 2018 under pressure from years of street protests, his successor Abiy Ahmed arrived touting extraordinary promises. Appointed rather than elected, Abiy moved fast: releasing political prisoners, lifting the state of emergency, inviting exiled opposition and media back, appointing women to half his cabinet, and concluding a peace deal with Eritrea that earned him the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. Washington invested heavily in justice reform, electoral institution-building, and civil society support, while continuing to protest that Abiy’s replacement for the notorious 2009 NGO law — which had decimated independent civil society — retained worrying supervisory powers and left the operating environment more constrained than donors had hoped. Then in November 2020, fighting broke out in Tigray, escalating into a civil war in which Ethiopian federal forces, Eritrean troops, and Amhara regional militias perpetrated mass atrocities and sexual violence on a catastrophic scale. The United States took far too long to call it what it was.
The world is experiencing a two decade-long negative trend for democracy and freedom, but that does not mean there are not positive stories. According to V-Dem, a global dataset on democracy, 18 countries show positive trends towards democratization, including eight simply moving in the right direction and 10 in the midst of U-turns. The 10 had been democratic, moved towards authoritarianism, and now are moving back towards democracy. The U-turn dataset cautiously includes Zambia, saying it is an “illustrative case of how fragile U-turns can be.” And the annual report was released before Peter Magyar’s victory over Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary, potentially putting that country back on a more democratic path, too.
Most importantly, as the V-Dem report notes, when countries seek to turn back in the direction of democracy after experiencing autocracy, there is a high success rate of becoming a consolidated democracy. These countries are geographically and contextually diverse, including small island nations such as Fiji, Sri Lanka, and the Solomon Islands, developed economies such as Thailand and Poland, and the major power Brazil. They are in regions across the globe, spanning from Latin America to East Asia, with every region in between.
This diversity also means diverse partners for development and democratization. The United States, traditionally the world’s largest donor and supporter of democracy programming, has virtually eliminated its support for such movements under the Trump administration, potentially even aiming to undermine them as it shifts support to far-right movements instead.
However, even when it was the primary source of resources and diplomatic support, the United States never stood alone in its support for freedom and democracy. Australia, for example, provides key diplomatic and development support for budding democracies, in particular in the Indo-Pacific, including Timor-Leste, a state V-Dem describes as “consistently improving on democracy since [2001].” The European Union is already discussing re-starting support to Hungary as that country aims to reorient towards democracy, and an EU accession treaty is being drafted for Montenegro, another of V-Dem’s democratizing states, and may include language that could lead to the loss of EU funds in the event of democratic backsliding.
Further, a recent proposal coming from former Prime Minister of Denmark and Secretary-General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen would create a “D7,” attempting to aggregate and multiply the support for democracies by six countries and the European Union. Even with a recalcitrant United States, other countries will continue to provide support for greater freedom, democracy, and human rights.
As some countries and regional bodies work to support budding democratic movements, it is important that they heed the lessons Zambia demonstrates. Democratization is not a linear process. Providing support for a new democracy and celebrating the steps forward while also strongly calling out backsliding, and working together to avoid a resurgence of authoritarianism is vital for the entire enterprise. While it may be tempting to support a charismatic leader through thick and thin, especially one who has seen the worst authoritarianism has to offer — as Zambia’s Hichilema did inside a jail cell — it ultimately does no favors for a country’s people who crave democracy and accountability.
